Conferences/SymposiaActivities

From large-scale tactile sensing to robot tactile awareness: modeling, design and processing challenges

Prof. Fulvio Mastrogiovanni (University of Genoa, Italy)

DATE : February 24, 2014 15:30-17:00

PLACE : IS Lecture Hall

The past few years have witnessed the rise of large-scale tactile sensing as a necessary capability robots must be endowed to. Whilst basic tactile sensing is considered a fundamental step to allow robots to successfully interact with the surrounding environment (usually with tactile-based feedback provided by fingertips in manipulation tasks), large-scale tactile sensing can provide insights into the cognitive processing that is necessary to model, represent and react to the world. As a matter of fact, large-scale, distributed tactile information (originating from the whole robot body) poses a number of new challenges at the technological and scientific levels: embedded networking, real-time issues, knowledge representation, tactile-based robot control, just to name but few.

In this talk, I will describe our experience in designing and using large-scale robot skin. I will first describe one of the few large-scale robot skin solutions that are literally available nowadays. Then, I will describe how the reference design poses new challenges at the overall robot design level. Finally, I will discuss the relationships between large-scale tactile sensing and high-level robot behaviors.

Bio sketch

Fulvio Mastrogiovanni is Assistant Professor at University of Genoa, Italy, where he teaches Software Architectures for Robotics and Ambient Intelligence as part of the joint European Master on Advanced Robotics (EMARO) - Robotics Engineering study curriculum. Fulvio received the M.Sc. and the Ph.D. in Robotics from University of Genoa in 2003 and 2008. Fulvio has been Visiting Professor at the Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand, Jiao Tong University, China, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany and Keio University, Japan. Currently, his research interests are in Ubiquitous and Humanoid Robotics, with a specific emphasis on real-time SW architectures, real-time AI, knowledge representation and reasoning, tactile sensing.

Fulvio has been awarded with the Best Paper Award at DARS 2008, IEEE RO-MAN 2010 and FedCSIS 2012. He served as managing coordinator for the FP7 EC-funded project ROBOSKIN, principal investigator of the SHELL project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development and key person in the FP7 EC-funded project CloPeMa.

Fulvio served as Information Automation co-Chair for IEEE CASE 2012, EU Program co-Chair for IEEE RO-MAN 2013, EU Program Chair for URAI 2013 and EU Program Chair for DARS 2014.